Digital media, from everyday apps to algorithmic systems, increasingly mediates power, identity and citizenship across the globe. The Chair in Digital Media Sociology is working to build disciplinary expertise and a strong scientific foundation to critically study this impact from a Global South perspective. Based in the Centre for Film and Media Studies, a key contribution by the Chair is the establishment of the Digital Media Sociology Lab. The lab uses interdisciplinary research, methodological experimentation and public engagement to examine how digital infrastructure shapes contemporary life.

The Chair’s research has advanced critical understandings of decolonising media research, digital citizenship, platform power, data politics and mediated civic life, with a particular focus on African contexts that are underrepresented in existing scholarship. Key to this work is the development of conceptually innovative frameworks and the advancement of methodological approaches that combine digital ethnography, platform analysis and creative practice. The Chair has pushed the discipline beyond predominantly Euro-American empirical and theoretical models, offering grounded and contextually informed perspectives that expand how digital media, power and social life are understood.